Farah Pahlavi's story is as turbulent as the recent history of her native Iran. She gained a throne and lost it, watched her husband die of cancer after being shunned by former allies and lived the past quarter century as a political refugee.
Three years ago, after the death of her youngest daughter, Pahlavi decided to share her story.
The memoir, "An Enduring Love: My Life With the Shah," became a bestseller upon its publication in France last month. The release of a US edition last week coincides with a renewed international focus on Iran and the Islamic fundamentalist regime that ousted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979.
"I needed some distance from those events," Pahlavi said in an interview last week at the home of a friend near Washington.
"I think in a way it was just coincidence that it came at a time when the world is more interested in Iran."
Pahlavi, 65, was a young architectural student in Paris when she caught the shah's eye and married him in 1959. She played an active role in the shah's reign until the royal family fled Iran January 16, 1979, amid massive protests that led to the formation of an Islamic government.
The shah died in exile in Egypt in July 1980 as radical Iranian students angered over US support for his regime held American diplomats hostage in Tehran and Iran's clerical rulers sought his extradition. His death and the family's exile played a role in the death of the couple's youngest daughter, Leila, in London nearly 11 years later.
For the former empress, who now divides her time between homes in Paris and Potomac, Maryland, near Washington, the book is both a catharsis and an effort to share her side of Iran's recent history for the generation of Iranians born since the Islamic revolution.
"I consider it a duty to my husband, and all my children and grandchildren and all the Iranians that have been born since the revolution." Pahlavi said.
"It's not a question of remembering us. It's a question of those Iranians wanting freedom and finding a respectable place in the family of nations."
Historians have said the shah's downfall was sparked by his authoritarian rule, close relations with the United States and modernisation programs which squandered the nation's vast oil wealth and angered conservative elements in Iranian society.
But in the book, Pahlavi defends her husband's attempts to modernise Iran, and says opponents exaggerated the extent of repression and corruption in his regime. She scoffs at claims the royal family made off with much of Iran's billions in oil revenues.
In response to questions about her husband's rule, she notes what the clerical regime instituted by the shah's nemesis, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, has meant to Iran and the world.
"The region of the Persian Gulf ... has since descended into chaos, becoming a breeding ground for fanaticism and international terrorism," she wrote.
"Everything we undertook has been sacrificed and wasted."
She insists the shah resisted abuses by the dreaded SAVAK secret police and refused to sanction repressive measures that might have saved his regime, such as a proposal by military advisers to stop Khomeini's return to Iran from France by shooting down his plane.
At the time, the shah was seriously ill with Waldenstrom's disease, a form of leukemia, a fact that was known only to her and a few close advisers, she wrote.
Pahlavi's book also continues her campaign for women's rights in Iran - a cause that made her a lightning rod for conservative Islamic critics of her husband's rule.
"The moment has come to hold up our heads and look to the future. And I think of the women in particular to lead the way," she wrote.
The book's publication coincides with renewed pressure on Iran's ruling clerics from reformers inside the country and from the United States, which has labelled the Tehran regime part of an "axis of evil" and pushed for greater international scrutiny of its nuclear ambitions.
Many Iranian exiles in the United States support efforts by the shah's eldest son, Reza Pahlavi, 43, to organise resistance to the Islamic regime, though it is unclear how much influence the movement has inside Iran.
Pahlavi said she hopes recent events would lead to a happy ending to both her story and her country's.
"My only hope is for Iran to become a free country," she said.